Setting Realistic Goals For Your Entrepreneurial Career

Most entrepreneurs have the highest of expectations for their business ventures. Yet, statistically, 90% of them never succeed.

This may not be because they’re not cut out to be entrepreneurs, but more likely due to poor marketing efforts. And it is especially true if you’re trying to succeed as a creator.

Theoretically, anything’s possible for anyone. However, you’ll have a much easier and psychologically healthier time starting off with more immediately tangible (and thus, attainable) objectives.

There is no set algorithm to follow for becoming the next Fortune 500 company. But, if instead, you set the goal to simply make a livable income, then an actual formula can be written with hard mathematics, and that can be attained.

Applying Algebra To Your Entrepreneurial Career

(And you thought that what you learned in school couldn’t be applied to real life! Pah!)

If you want to be your own boss, however many customers you need to buy from you depends greatly upon your desired quality of life, as well as on the product or service that you will offer and its price.

For example, let’s say you want to make $50,000 per year and offer a product for $10.00.

Then, all you’d need to do is take your annual revenue goal and divide it by the revenue you’d earn from each sale. That would result in how many paying customers you would need.

If “a” (annual pay) = $50,000 and “r” (revenue per sale) = $10, then…

… you would need 5,000 customers that will buy from you just once per year.

Now, realistically, if you simply have a following of 5,000 people, each and every one of them will likely not buy your product or service. It’s normal and to be expected.

So, set the goal higher, for instance, 10,000 or even more. That should do the trick.

Now all of a sudden, you have a real figure to work with. You can strategize how to achieve it yourself. Or you can contract a marketing strategist or a marketing agency to do that for you.

The rest is up to creating and following a step-by-step marketing plan for achieving that. That would involve a website with a blog on which you can produce content that captures your target audience’s attention, respect, and gets them to follow you.

Analyzing Your Resources

After you’ve determined a target audience that you’ll stick with, assess how you’re going to reach them and convince them to follow you with a call-to-action (like what you’ll read at the end of this very article).

In order to do this, you’re going to need to assess how much money you have for PPC (pay-per-click) advertising that’ll bring people to your content. We recommend that you set aside at least a few hundred dollars per month for this purpose. It will help you gain your following much quicker than it would be organically.

If you don’t have any money whatsoever for advertising, then don’t worry. You’re in good company, because we didn’t either when we started this company.

You’re going to have to do what we have also had to do thus far in order to build our audience: bootstrap with guerrilla marketing on social media.

Setting Real Milestones For Your Entrepreneurial Career

Okay, so, let’s say that you want to sell a product from which you earn $10.00 from every individual sale. Your goal is to make $50,000 per year.

…you’ve got $400 to invest in PPC advertising for your blog every month that you set aside from your day job, because you’re not quite ready to make the transition to being a full-time entrepreneur yet. You’ve got a family to support and you don’t want to make any gamble with your finances by risking your family’s livelihood on something that may not pay off. Don’t feel bad about it. That is exactly what we did and what many successful entrepreneurs recommend doing.

You write four articles in the niche subject that connects your target audience. You publish each article once per week and share it around on social media. Then, you invest $100 per article to advertise with.

Let’s say that your efforts attract you 420 followers on average per month. This means that it will take you approximately 23.8 months (round up to 24) or two years of effort to build the following you need to make the life-change to being a full-time entrepreneur.

Reap The Results Of Your Efforts

Once that’s done, release your product or service, and there’s your payday. Sales are pretty much guaranteed because, by the time you launch, you’d have been blogging for two years.

By then, your audience knows you, trusts you, and looks forward to reading what you release next. At this point, you are more than just a person to them.

You’re a brand name. And your following will likely buy from you not only because you’ve been nurturing them with relevant content for the past two years, but simply because you released it, simply because your name is on it, and they trust you.

They want to buy from you.

That’s the same social power of big brands just on a smaller niche scale. Because remember, you don’t actually need millions and millions of fans to make a decent living. You only need enough of a core true fan following that’ll buy what you sell.

And the most amazing thing about this approach is that once you launch your product or service and promote it to your audience that you’ve established…

…they’re not going anywhere!

Your fans aren’t going to leave you!

You likely won’t have to make the same investment again (so long as you stay true to your followers). That audience is yours forever.

And what’s even better is that you’ll find that, after a certain point, your audience is just going to grow on its own. Because as you publish more and more content, the people that have been following you and reading your work for so long will naturally share your work that they love so much already. Especially if you ask them to!

This will make you exposed to their friends, and their friends’ friends, and so on. Without you having to do anything more than making a simple Facebook update, Twitter post, and/or sending out an e-mail.

Not Fast Enough?

Let’s say that two years is too long of a time for you. Let’s say that you want a bigger audience, faster.

…no problem.

Though you may not like what our answer to that is, which is:

…work harder.

Instead of publishing four articles per month and sharing them around, publish eight, twelve, or sixteen, etc. and/or set aside more money from your day job for advertising. (As a matter of fact, businesses that blog 16 and more times a month get 3.5 times more traffic than those who do only up to 4 times. Imagine if you do that and invest more funds into PPC ads!)

If you want exponentially greater results, then you’re going to have to put in an exponentially greater effort.

Your career as an entrepreneur, in this case, becomes a direct reflection of what you put into it. What you get is directly proportional to what you give.

…and here’s that call-to-action that I was talking about:

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Mike Norton is an American award-winning Internet marketing strategist with a BA in Internet marketing from Full Sail University.

He’s also a writer, entrepreneur, and a quantum physicist studying part-time at the University of York. He is the bestselling independent author of Fighting for Redemption, and a veteran of the United States military who is a 7-time winner of the USS Dwight Eisenhower award for essays of world peace and respect.

As a mostly self-educated vagabond, he gains inspiration from a myriad of experiences wrought from the adventures of his nomadic lifestyle. He prolifically writes and journals where ever he goes in the world, from one country to the next.